Speeding up Email and Ditching buttons

This is where a email needs to evolve – both on the UI/UX side and the etiquette aide. The fact of the matter is, younger people dislike and do not use email as much …and for good reason. It feels like a slower form of digital communication. If it feels slower it is slower.

• Emails often imply or demand inefficient and irrelevant ‘analog letter etiquette’ both in tone and formatting.
• Enterprise email clients and best-of-breed web-based clients like gmail overwhelm you with options for formatting, cc boxes, draft saving etc.

Most of the time, all you want to do is dash off a simple one sentence line of text and fire it off to someone you know. SMS, baby.

We ditched the <vote> button on the poll product we built and have never received one complaint from end users despite serving over 500,000 polls a month. A vote occurs the moment you select a radio button. One click.  This may violate some arcane notion of “how a radio button is supposed to function” based on 1990s web interface rules but it also saves time.  Guess what matters more?

100,000 seconds is almost 28 hours. In other words, I’ve probably wasted a day of my life hitting that stupid button

Gmail Lite: If You Build It Google, We Will Come.